I mean, never mind that he did not say that all the players are equally replaceable, or that MLB would not immensely suffer, or that all players are the same, or that an MLB player is equal in economic value to a beer vendor, or that there would not be a big drop in attendance if they all vanished. He did not say AAA players are the same as major league players and it’s kinda stupid to accuse him of that since, logically, if he thought that, he would be advising the Red Sox to get rid of all the players they have making more than the minimum. I realize it’s fun for people to criticize him for stuff he didn’t say, but it’s also dishonest.
What he said was in response to someone claiming “the players are the entire game,” and he is absolutely, one hundred percent correct in saying that’s stupid. If the 750 MLB players all vanished, they would be replaced, and within a surprisingly short period of time the level of play at the MLB level would not be visibly different to 99.5% of fans. Baseball would still be an immensely popular sport and people would want to watch professional baseball and would pay to see the best available players put on the uniforms of the Yankees, Dodgers and Cardinals. Yes, the new players would not be nearly as good as the outgoing ones, but baseball would still exist, and the talent level would rise back to where it was. MLB on average turns over its entire player base every six years, after all.
The statement to which he was responding - that players are the entire game - is self-evidently stupid. If the current batch of MLB players were the entire game and all that mattered, they would not play for MLB. They’d go play their own games, charge admission and keep all the money. But they don’t, because they are not the entire game. There is a lot to producing the consumer product that is MLB. You need people to design and build stadia, people to do the scheduling, people to ump, people to broadcast, people to sew the uniforms, people to turn the bats, people to keep the grounds, people to write the stories, people to run the accounting department, people to run the social media accounts, people to arrange the travel, people to operate the scoreboard, people to be trainers and coaches and strength consultants, and yes, people to sell the beer. That does not mean an accountant should make the same as a beer vendor should make the same as Chris Sale, but it does mean they are all contributors to a cooperative enterprise.
James can be an old fool at times and in all honesty this was a dumb thing to say the way he said it just because it was inevitable that
A) People would deliberately misinterpret it, as we are seeing here, to suit an agenda, and
B) As a representative of an MLB team, he is responsible to not say things that will piss people off, even if he’s being honest.
But he was right. Nothing he said was wrong, and everything people are saying was wrong were things he did not actually say.
